Obama: 'Time' person of the year (and leader of an awesome geek squad)

“You do understand that as President of the United States, the amount
of power you have is overstated in some ways,” Obama tells Time magazine. “But what you do have the capacity to do is to set a direction.”
Time

The magazine spills considerable ink talking about the significance of Obama—the first African-American president, a man who campaigned openly on a platform of raising taxes, a politician who ended the military's ban on gay service members and who ultimately backed same-sex marriage—winning a second term. The magazine described him as being the "architect of the New America."

But in words and in photos, Time also devoted considerable praise to a group of people who helped Obama win—the data miners manipulated social media to get pro-Obama voters to the polls and to encourage more people to contribute financially to the campaign.

"Message is one thing, but in modern presidential politics, it can’t go very far without a machine. And during Obama’s 2012 campaign, that machine was fueled with new methods devised by a geek squad convened from multinational ad agencies, corporate consultancies and high-tech start-ups," starts a story about this team from Time's Michael Scherer.

The goals were the same as ever: more money in the bank, more door knocks, more phone calls, more voter registrations and more voters at the polls. But the methods for achieving those ends in 2012 bordered on the revolutionary. A squad of dozens of data crunchers created algorithms for predicting the likelihood that someone would respond to specific types of requests to accomplish each of those goals. Vast quantities of information were collected and then employed to predict just which television shows various target voters in certain cities were watching at just what time of day — the better to decide where to place TV ads. Facebook, which was an afterthought in 2008, became the new electronic telephone call, employed to persuade more than 600,000 Obama supporters to reach out to 5 million swing-state friends online with targeted messages in the days before the election. One woman in central Ohio who was living with her young, voting-age daughter reported that her house got four different visits on the morning of Election Day, each from a different neighbor making sure both women had remembered to vote.

J. "Josh" Jennings Moss has spent time on the police beat in Florida, on the political trail in Washington, D.C., and on the business front in New York. Among the places he’s journalized: Condé Nast Portfolio, FoxNews.com, ABCNews.com, the Advocate, the Washington Times, and the Tampa Tribune. Josh graduated from the University of Arizona and lives in New York City.

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